In Baghdad, Damage Looks To Be Light

December 18, 1998|BY HOWARD SCHNEIDER The Washington Post

BAGHDAD — It seemed a day like any other. Fountains played, schools were in session and the electricity stayed on. With sundown came the usual procession of Thursday night wedding caravans, winding through downtown streets with car horns blaring.

Then, about 10 p.m., the second wave of bombing crashed over Baghdad.

Brilliant red tracer rounds from Iraqi anti-aircraft batteries lit the sky over this 700-year-old capital, followed by a series of concussive blasts. A few minutes later, a large explosion shook the information ministry, which is situated in an area of drab apartment houses and monolithic public buildings near the Tigris River and serves as the base for scores of foreign journalists.

On the second night of the U.S. and British air campaign against Iraq, bombs and missiles began striking in and around this sprawling, palm-studded capital of broad boulevards, blue-domed mosques and vast government buildings that house the security and intelligence apparatus of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

Iraqi officials said late Thursday night that one hospital had been lightly damaged. Reporters who toured the building, a teaching hospital, in the company of a government escort were shown a man whose leg had been amputated, purportedly after he was injured by an explosion.

The air raid came at the end of what had seemed a relatively normal day, despite bombing the night before on the city's outskirts.

Until Thursday night's raids, damage to the city had been light. None of the major landmarks, government buildings or communications towers in the center of town had sustained any obvious damage. Electrical facilities, roads and bridges, heavily targeted in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, appeared to be untouched. Shops and businesses were open as usual. The sculptured flag at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier remained lit.

Iraqi officials said they did not have precise information on casualties from the bombing, which began on Wednesday after the United States and Britain concluded Iraq was not living up to its obligations to open records and buildings to U.N. weapons inspectors. Late Thursday night, a Health Ministry official estimated the number of civilian dead at 25.

Little information has been available on the extent of bomb damage in southern Iraq or outside Baghdad. Nor was there much to see in the capital. Government officials escorted foreign reporters to Karada Street, where they showed them a large hole in the pavement purportedly made by a bomb or missile. They took them to a house whose windows had been blown out and whose doors had been damaged by an explosion.

The damage in both places seemed surprisingly modest, but residents along Karada Street and the owner of the house at the other site said bombs of some sort definitely fell in their neighborhoods.

Iraqi officials reported late Thursday that an air strike had destroyed a rice warehouse in Hussein's home city of Tikrit, and that a stray bomb targeted at the southern city of Basra had exploded just across the border in Iran.

On Thursday night, Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf contended the military response was far out of proportion to the problems between Iraq and the weapons inspectors.

Calling President Clinton a "corrupt, dissolute and spasmodic ruler," Sahhaf mockingly listed sites targeted during the first wave of the campaign. They included, he said, the home of Hussein's daughter Hala -- she and her family were not injured -- as well as several buildings Sahhaf said were already under strict U.N. monitoring.